Talking to author and activist Edgar Villaneuva about “budgets as moral documents” – where we spend money reflects our real commitment to our values – as well as the role of representation in ensuring safety.
Fund Participation… Not Isolation
This is the fifth in a series of 6 posts, building up to the launch of my book Defund Fear. Each post draws out, from the book and from the wider community, the specific steps the new administration must take in order to prioritize the safety and security of people in America.
To achieve true safety, especially for the most vulnerable, the Biden Administration must defund isolation and instead fund participation.
Right now we’ve got a country that’s discouraging or outright preventing people from voting and other forms of civic engagement. Real democracy expands access to power, choice, and decision-making for everyone. Strengthening the muscle of collective action is imperative so we can hold large institutions and powerful individuals accountable. When we take part in things, when we engage, when we have a sense of choice in the matter, we feel a greater sense of worth, dignity, purpose. All this goes a long way to creating social cohesion, trust, relationships, and accountability and therefore, a greater sense of safety.
#4 Defund Isolation; Fund Participation
- Establish political and democratic accountability through accessible, universal, and automatic voter registration
- Ensure formerly and currently incarcerated people the right to vote; reward states that end their disenfranchisement
- Ensure formerly incarcerated people reentry support: access to housing, jobs, healthcare, education and mental health supports. Use Medicaid dollars to support people coming out of prison with rental subsidies and other communities-based services, in lieu of hospital care
- Restore the Voting Rights Act
- Prohibit prison gerrymandering
- Offer federal incentives for municipalities and states that use participatory budgeting to give people a real say
- Confront disinformation platforms
- Commit to ending the Electoral College
Fund Resources, end systemic deprivation
This is the fourth in a series of 6 posts, building up to the launch of my book Defund Fear. Each post draws out, from the book and from the wider community, the specific steps the new administration must take in order to prioritize the safety and security of people in America.
To achieve true safety, especially for the most vulnerable, the Biden Administration must shift from systemic deprivation to investing resources in communities.
The third shift means the government directly ensures universal access to the goods and services that are essential for human dignity, including housing, healthcare, higher education, childcare, eldercare and pensions. As it stands now, poverty, lack of housing, lack of education and health care, unemployment, toxic and polluted natural resources, and other manifestations of economic deprivation serve to create a class of people for whom safety is never, ever guaranteed.
Funding can come from a tax on wealth (as opposed to income)—for example, 2 percent for net worth above $50 million, and 3 percent for those with more than $1 billion, would generate $2.75 trillion in revenue over a decade.
#3 Defund Deprivation; Fund Resources
- Guarantee One Fair Wage which eliminates the subminimum wage for tipped workers, incarcerated workers, youth, people with disabilities
- Increase the minimum wage immediately to $15/hour beginning with federal employees
- Guarantee the right to form and join unions to all workers
- Guarantee quality healthcare to all, expanding Medicaid in every state, securing Medicare, working towards enacting a public universal health care option and building up our public health infrastructure
- Make housing a universal right. Expand public and affordable housing and rental assistance. Stop all foreclosures and evictions immediately; enact a rent freeze
- Expand Community Land Trusts—taking housing off the market and turning it back to community ownership—and make them eligible for funding and incentives offered for affordable housing
- Commit to the Green New Deal and No New Fossil Fuels
- Establish a Universal Child Benefit that provides a monthly $400 for children ages 6 to 18 or $500 for children under 6
- Cancel student debt
- Expand access to reproductive justice by incorporating the Each Woman Act (H.R. 1692) and thereby repealing the Hyde Amendment which blocks federal Medicaid funding for abortions
- Create a care infrastructure: guarantee universal access to childcare, home supports for elders and people with disabilities, and dignity for care workers: living wages, portable benefits, and the right to collective action.
- Make immigrants eligible for all public welfare and social programs.
- Fund community-based organizations providing non-punitive, non-carceral programming related to: restorative justice, transformative justice, healing trauma, crisis intervention, robust first responders.
VIDEO | In conversation with Annie Leonard of Greenpeace US
“The situation is so different than when Biden was last anywhere near the White House…. we need Biden to come out of the gate as leader on climate change, here and now…”
Culmination, Not Aberration
Trump is not the only reason for America’s troubles. The 45th President, for all the damage he has done, is not the sole source of America’s insecurity and suffering.
A look at the unvarnished history of this country reveals that the legacy of our lack of safety goes back centuries, since the country’s inception. Trump’s reign of terror was not an aberration; it was a culmination. Lest we forget:
- 1673: English colonists in Connecticut block the two exits to the walled village where the Pequot tribe live and set fire to it, shooting anyone who tries to escape. Between 500-700 children, elders and adults are killed
- 1763: Smallpox blankets: British soldiers in the Great Lakes area use germ warfare to decimate the Native resistors
- 1793: When Yellow Fever hits Philadelphia, African Americans are believed immune (as many were to malaria) and enlisted to do nursing, collect bodies and dig graves. The theory is wrong: black people are not immune, and they died at the same rates as whites in the epidemic. Afterwards, African Americans are accused of “extorting high wages, or even stealing from those they nursed”
- 1845: J.Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynaecology” conducts experimental fistula surgeries without anaesthesia on enslaved black women. One 17-year-old woman endures 30 unsuccessful surgeries
- 1918: 33-year-old Mary Turner, 8 months pregnant, publicly declares the injustice of her innocent husband’s lynching. In retaliation, the white mob ties her from a tree by her ankles, douses her with gasoline, burns her, and while she still lives, slices open her belly so her baby falls on the ground, alive and crying out, before a man stomps on its head and crushes it
- 1919: In Elaine, Arkansas, sharecroppers enlist the help of a white attorney from Little Rock to help them demand fair prices for their goods, because each year the white landowners extort huge, unfounded sums. Hearing of the “insurrection,” the Governor enlists 500 soldiers to round up the “negroes” and “kill any negro who refused to surrender immediately.” At least 200 black men, women and children were slaughtered
- 1930-1970: Coerced sterilizations in South are so common they’re referred to as “Mississippi appendectomies.” Between 1930 to 1970, 65 percent of the 7,600-plus sterilizations ordered by the state of North Carolina were carried out on black women. A 1965 survey finds that one-third of Puerto Rican women between the ages of 20 and 49 have been sterilized in population control programs enforced by the US government
- 1932-1972: The Tuskegee Experiments: the US Public Health Service entices 600 poor black sharecropper men to enlist in a clinical study by telling them they’ll receive free healthcare over six months. They’re never told the purpose of the study is actually to observe untreated syphillis. It’s extended for 40 years, and even after penicillin is discovered as effective treatment by 1947, none are treated. Many die or pass the disease onto their wives and newborns
- 1968: Cancer Alley: In the town of Reserve, Louisiana, chemical corporation DuPont begins emitting carcinogenic toxins, one of over 150 petrochemical industries situated between Baton Rouge and New Orleans along the Mississippi River, exposing residents over decades through the present day. The risk of cancer is 50 times the national average. Nearly every household has lost someone to cancer. At least seven large new petrochemical facilities and expansions have been approved for places in the river corridor since 2015. The COVID-19 death rate here so far has been five times higher than the overall US rate.
- 1989: federal drug czar William Bennett urges hospital delivery rooms serving black women to introduce screening for cocaine. Mothers who test positive lose their newborns on the spot; some even go to jail, still bleeding from labor. Tens of thousands have their babies and older children taken by the state and put in foster care.
VIDEO | What Safety Means With Danielle Sered
I recently had an amazing conversation with Danielle Sered, author and executive director of Common Justice, about what safety means and how we achieve it. Watch it below!